This article contributes to the discourse of the body and the voice in feminist psychoanalytic film theory by exploring the currently under-theorised notion of the singing body in particular, as this notion finds manifestation in Disney's Singing Princess as filmic trope. Analyses of vocal musical coding follow her trajectory across 13 Disney princess films to reveal deeper insight into what she sings, how she sings, and why she sings. In this manner, it is argued, the Singing Princess gradually emerges from her genealogical roots as innamorata, a position of vocal corporealisation and diegetic confinement, to one wherein her voice assumes a position of authority over the narrative, and from one of absolute submissiveness and naïve obedience to a greatly enriched experience of her own subjectivity.
This article engages with the Lacanian tradition of film theory in order to suggest some of the waysin which music in film may be understood to contribute significantly to subject identification in filmicexperience. Two points are argued: 1) that Lacan’s distinction between the three orders - the Real,the Imaginary and the Symbolic - may usefully be understood in musical terms, and, 2) that thetwo vectors of Lacan’s graphe complet – the vector of speech and the vector of drive – providemeaningful insight into the manner in which the three orders shape filmic musical experience.Analysis of Miklos Rosza’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) serves to illustrate suchinsights.
This article contributes to the discourse of the body and the voice in feminist psychoanalytic film theory by exploring the currently under-theorised notion of the singing body in particular, as this notion finds manifestation in Disney's Singing Princess as filmic trope. Analyses of vocal musical coding follow her trajectory across 13 Disney princess films to reveal deeper insight into what she sings, how she sings, and why she sings. In this manner, it is argued, the Singing Princess gradually emerges from her genealogical roots as innamorata, a position of vocal corporealisation and diegetic confinement, to one wherein her voice assumes a position of authority over the narrative, and from one of absolute submissiveness and naïve obedience to a greatly enriched experience of her own subjectivity.
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